Bluets

How does the memory of a story work?

I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books, Bluets, a tiny memoir—or perhaps it’s a prose poem—comprising 240 “propositions” centered around the color blue. But it’s more than that, of course. While Maggie Nelson explores her obsession with blue and all that it represents, she explores grieving.

I’m re-reading it because it inspired a memoir I’ve been working on for several years, so it’s more than just a favorite book, it’s a companion, a mentor, a guide in the sometimes dark wilderness of creation.

I love the act of reading to write. “Reading to write” as in reading as an act of dreaming, of conjuring, of exploration. I gather with a book and its author in an intimate conversation, and the co-mingling of thoughts, images, impressions somehow weaves into my own work as if we’re all collaborating.

I love all of the shapes and textures of Bluets. I love how the provocations are each surprising, meandering, desultory, yet they keep adding up to something more, weaving together, going deeper. I don’t know exactly where it’s all going, even while re-reading it.

I always advise readers who hit an impasse in their writing to turn to their favorite book or author. These invisible teachers. The mood they whisper to you is like a drink to sip while you write.

The story is in the memory of the story

The title of the book comes from a Joan Mitchell painting, Les Bluets (The Cornflowers). Lydia Davis, a favorite author of mine, coincidentally wrote a beautiful essay about the painting, and her essay somehow seems intrinsic to Nelson’s book (and a guide for me as a writer).

Davis talks about going to Mitchell’s studio in Vétheuil, just north of Paris, when she was a young writer, and she remembers “how I worked at my writing, driving myself relentlessly to do better and more, with moments of pleasure, but often a hounding sense of obligation, a fear that if I did not work terribly hard something would catch up with me—perhaps the possibility that I did not need to be doing this.”

Even a great writer like Lydia Davis can be beleagured with doubts.

Davis studied the painting (included above), and it elicited all sorts of questions and emotions. It was a confrontation with opacity.

She came up with some interpretations of the painting, but then realized “part of the force of the painting was that it continued to elude explanation. I became willing to allow aspects of the painting to remain mysterious, and I became willing to allow aspects of other problems to remain unsolved as well, and it was this new tolerance for, and then satisfaction in, the unexplained and unsolved that marked a change in me.”

A satisfaction in the unexplained and unsolved.

To reside in such a feeling is a wonderful place to live as a creator (or as a human). It’s a place of wonder (and wandering), of opening, of curiosity.

Davis now says that she asks herself not how the painting works, but how the memory of the painting works.

This made me wonder if we should always write toward such a memory, the after glow of our work, the mystery we’d like to hang in the air and traipse after a reader.

We writers are very conscious of the effects our words create in the moment, when a reader is (hopefully) enthralled with our story, but I wonder if the question we should write toward is what will the memory of the story be?

We don’t have to solve everything in our work, after all. Life is largely unexplainable and unsolveable.

Because Writing with Vulnerability

I believe that writing with vulnerability is more important than any craft tool because being vulnerable is how we connect with others, so writers who risk vulnerability tend to write stories that are the most compelling.

Join me in a live, two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing with Vulnerability, on May 19 and learn about what happens when writers share the most difficult parts of their story in service of deeper truths.

Because a quote or two

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”

~ Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.”

~ Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Because groceries. And nourishment in general.

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I bring this wisdom and more to my one-on-one work with writers.

End notes

What I’m reading: Beyond Bluets, I’ve started to read Mark Strand’s poetry. A friend of mine became a good friend of his in the last few years before he died, and the stories I’ve heard about him intrigue me. I’ve started with Blizzard of One, which won the Pulitzer, and includes this lovely poem, Delirium Waltz.

What I’m watching: I’m looking forward to watching Challengers, with Zendaya, tonight. I watched the infamous Tom Brady roast on Netflix and loved Nikki Glaser in it, so I want to catch her new comedy special this week as well.

What I’m listening to: Adagio in G Minor. Just because I love a touch of melodrama from time to time.

What I’m photographing: A dog walk took me by the famous punk club at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley yesterday. I’ve always loved the smattering of stickers an odd bits of graffitti, etc., that makes up the punk aesthetic. If there’s a space, fill it with noise.